Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/754

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738 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

graphical science, we have to remember that it is like the ovum of biology a developing unit containing the potency of a great realization. What, to the geographer in his humanist mood, is the city, but the effort of this regional unit to realize its own potency for evolution? City development is thus, for the geog- rapher, no isolated phenomenon, but a normal stage the cul- minating one in a long sequence of events and processes. It is the ceaselessly renewed attempt to make for each region here and now its own Eden its own Utopia.

XIII. It may be taken as a postulate of social geography that every region contains the potency of a city or cities w r hich shall be for that region, here and now, its heaven or its hell. And in the complexity of causes that lead to evolution toward the ideal city, or toward its negation, there is a geographical factor awaiting discernment, analysis, comparison with the other factors, and resynthesis into a synthetic conception. The traditional civitas, the urbs solis, and other similar utopist visions, have thus their necessary geographical aspect, unless they are to be completely divorced from reality. To the traveler (who is, of course, an incipient geographer) one aspect at least of the geographical factor is necessarily known. The hard experience of the desert is, to the traveler, a geographical prerequisite of the good time that awaits him in Damascus. And if, dispensing with the geo- graphical prerequisite, he attempts to make his Damascus a per- petual Elysium, what happens? He is not long in discovering the reality of the phenomenon known in archaic phrase as the fall, and he quickly discovers a vital connection between geography and theology. Geography indeed, like every other science, has its element to contribute to the reinterpretation and revitalizing of religious phenomena. If it may be allowed to a modest geog- rapher to revise the judgment of so great a theologian as St. Augustine, it would be to point out the tenuity of his geo- graphical experience. Had St. Augustine been more of a travel- er, he would doubtless have avoided the geographico-historical blunder of believing that it is predetermined once for all which are the cities of God and which are the cities of Satan. One of